Kenneth Robeson - The Man of Bronze

"I found it," said the man behind the curtain. "Now, let's get down to business. This Savage person has proved to be more of a menace than we ever dreamed."

The speaker paused, and when he continued, there was a distinct twinge of fear in his voice. "Savage visited President Avispa to-night, and Avispa 0. K.'d everything. The old fool! We shall soon be shut of him! But we must stop Savage! We must wipe him out, and those five fighting devils with him!"

"Agreed," muttered a hairy cutthroat. "They must not reach the Valley of the Vanished!"

"Why not let them go ahead into the Valley of the Vanished?" growled another bandit. "That would be the end of them. They'd never get out!"

Greater became the fear in the voice of the revolution master mind. "You idiot! You do not know Savage! The man is uncanny. I went to New York, but I failed to stop him. And I had with me two members of that fanatical sect of warriors among the inhabitants of the Valley of the Vanished. Those men are accomplished fighters. Their own people are in terror of them. But Savage escaped!"

Uneasy was the silence that impregnated the room.

"What if the members of this warrior sect should find you are not one of them?" asked an outlaw. "You've led them to believe you are the flesh-and-blood son of one of their old deities. They worship you. But suppose they get wise that you are a faker?"

"They won't!" snapped the man behind the curtain. "They won't, because I control the Red Death!"

"The Red Death! gulped one man.

Another breathed. "The Red Death — what is it?"

Loud, ugly laughter came from the man back of the curtain. "A drunken genius of a scientist sold the secret of causing the Red Death, and curing it. He sold it to me! And then I killed him so no one would ever get it — or, rather, the cure for it."

A nervous shifting passed over the assembled bandits.

"If we could just solve the mystery of that gold that comes out of the Valley of the Vanished," one mumbled. "If we could find where they get it, we could forget this revolution."

"We can't!" declared the man back of the curtain. "I've tried and tried. Morning Breeze, the chief of the warrior sect of which I have made myself head, does not know where it comes from. Only old King Chaac, ruler of the Valley of the Vanished, knows. And you couldn't torture it out of him."

"I'd like to take my men in there with machine guns!" a bandit chieftain muttered angrily.

"You tried that once, didn't you?" snapped the curtain speaker. "And you were nearly wiped out for your pains. The Valley of the Vanished is impregnable. The best we can do is get enough gold as offerings to finance this revolt."

"How do you get the gold?" asked a robber, evidently not as well posted as the others.

Again the man laughed back of the curtain. "I simply turn the Red Death loose on the tribe. Then they make a big offering of gold which reaches my hands. Then I give them the cure for the Red Death." He snorted mirthfully. "The ignorant dupes think their deity sends the Red Death, and the gold offering appeases his wrath."

"Well, you had better turn the Red Death loose soon," suggested a man. "We need an offering bad. If we don't get it, we can't pay for those guns we must have to put over the revolt."

"I will, very shortly. I have been sending my blue plane over the Valley of the Vanished. That's a new idea of mine. It impresses the inhabitants of the Valley a lot. Blue is their sacred color. And they think the plane is a big winged god flying around."

There was a lot of evil laughter in appreciation of their leader's cleverness.

"That Red Death is great stuff!" grated the man behind the curtain. "It put old man Savage out — "

The speaker suddenly emitted a frenzied scream and sprang forward, taking the curtain with him. He plunged head over heels across the floor.

The stunned bandits saw, towering in the door back of the curtain, a great bronze, frightsome figure of a man.

"Doc Savage!" one squawked.

Doc Savage it was, right enough. Doc, when he had seen that knife in the street, had a moment later heard footsteps approaching. He had followed the man who had picked up the knife to this hotel room.

Doc had heard the whole vile plot!

And for probably the first time in his career, Doc had failed to get his man. Rage at the leader of the revolutionists, the murderer of his father, had momentarily blinded Doc. A tiny gasp had escaped from his great chest — and the man had heard.

A bandit drew a pistol. Another doused the lights. Guns roared deafeningly. Blows smacked. Terrific blows that tore flesh and bone! Blows such as only Doc Savage could deliver!

The window burst with a glassy rattle as somebody leaped through, heedless of the fact that it was three floors to the earth. A second man took the same leap.

The fight within the room was over in a matter of thundering seconds.

Doc Savage turned on the lights. Ten bandits in various stages of stupor and unconsciousness and even death, were strewed on the floor. Three of them would never murder again. And the Blanco Grande police, already clamoring in the corridor outside, would make short shift of the rest.

To the window, Doc swept. Poising a moment easily, he took the three-story drop as lightly as if he were leaping off a table.

Under the window, he found another cutthroat. The man had broken his neck in the plunge.

There was no trace of the leader. The man had survived the jump and escaped.

Doc stood there, rage tingling all through his powerful bronze frame. The murderer of his father! And he didn't even know who the man was!

For Doc, in following the fellow to the hotel, had not once been able to glimpse the master villain's face. Up there in the room, the curtain had enveloped the fiend until the lights went out.

Doc slowly quitted the vicinity of the hotel with its holocaust of death. In that hostelry room, he had left something that would become a legend in Hidalgo. A dozen men whipped in a matter of seconds!

For days, the Blanco Grande police puzzled over what manner of fighter had overpowered these worst of Hidalgo's bandits in a hand-to-hand fray.

Every cutthroat had a reward on his unkempt head. The reward went unclaimed. Finally, by decree of President Avispa, it was turned over to charity.

Doc Savage, with hardly a thought about what he had done, had gone to his camp and to bed.

By the time the sun had crawled off one of Hidalgo's spike like mountaintops, Doc and his men were ready for departure.

Doc had taken his usual two-hour exercise long before dawn, while the others still slept.

After that, Doc had awakened his men, and they had all seized brushes and quick-drying blue paint, and gone over their entire plane. The ship was now blue, the sacred color of the Mayans!

"If the inhabitants of this mysterious Valley of the Vanished think we're riding in a holy chariot," Doc had commented, "they may let us hang around long enough to make friends."

Ham, waspish and debonair, carrying his inevitable sword cane — for he had several of them — offered jocosely: "And if they believe in evolution, we can arouse their interest by passing Monk off as the missing link."

"Oh, yeah?" Monk grinned. "Some day you're gonna find yourself in a pile that will pass for hamburger steak, and you won't know any more about who done it than you do about who framed that ham-stealing charge on you."

Red-necked, Ham twiddled his cane and had nothing more to say.

Gasoline for twenty hours' flying reposed in the tanks of the big tri-motor speed plane.

Doc, in the control bucket, turned the radial motors over with the electro-inertia starting mechanism. He let the cylinders warm so there would be no such unpleasantness as a cold motor stopping at a critical moment in the take-off.